what is the consensus on these digitizing scopes?

[playboy_shrek]

from browing old threads its a bit of a mixed bag some hate and some like them. they look really cool to me because the CRT screen just looks much nicer than the low quality stuff in older scopes and even lower end ones.

do you recommend them and which are good? currently I can get a Hewlett Packard HP 54503A for about 200 shipped to me

[oPossum]

I have several old HP DSOs and they are still very useful tools. I hesitate to recommend them simply because they are old and something will eventually fail that may or may not be practical or possible to fix.

I wouldn't recommend going older than the second generation Megazoom (5462x series). They usually can be found for about $150 with a bit of searching and patience. Would not recommend getting that 54503 unless is was free or close to it.

My [hp] collection...

[Stray Electron]

  make sure all of the channels are working BEFORE you buy it! I would also have the seller run it for 24 hours or so to see if any of the caps are on the verge of failing.   Also are the probes included and do they have all of the parts needed (tips, grabbers, ground leads) to use? A decent set of four probes are probably worth close to $200. You don't say where you are so I can't say if that's a good price in your area. But around the US the scopes alone aren't worth more than about $30. I have a 54510A that I bought for $30 about 6 years ago and it still works well and I do like the LARGE screen.

[David Hess]

I would not recommend them for general purpose work because they lack peak detection.  Typically that kind of bandwidth (500 MHz) combined with low sample rate (20 Msamples/second) would be suitable for applications like semiconductor characterization where aliasing is not a consideration.

[THDplusN_bad]

[..] You don't say where you are so I can't say if that's a good price in your area. But around the US the scopes alone aren't worth more than about $30. I have a 54510A that I bought for $30 about 6 years ago and it still works well and I do like the LARGE screen.

That statement makes me envy-green and starting to cry over the low prices in the US compared to the surplus market prices in Europe... 
But, you have heard that before so I'd better stop before you are getting bored...

Cheers,

THDplusN_bad